On Uncertainty
David Lambert
It is has become one of the truisms of this
extraordinary year that we are living in a period
of chronic uncertainty. This is partly a matter of
practical uncertainty – for example, the ever-
changing and increasingly baffling rules and
regulations being set down by governments. It is
also an emotional and spiritual uncertainty. The
props of everyday existence, so long taken for
granted, are no longer there – work, travel,
recreation, meetings with friends and family.
And in addition we are all being worn down by
the uncertainty of where this period is taking us,
the alarming idea of a ‘new normal’.
The future has always been uncertain, of course
– I could fall under a bus tomorrow etc.; but we
all learn strategies for managing that kind of
uncertainty, generally by simply putting it out of
our mind. The present, though, offers a uniquely
intense and relentless uncertainty, of which we
are reminded daily, hourly or even continually,
depending on our news and social media habits;
an uncertainty made far more problematic and
emotionally challenging because it is framed by
decision-making (that of politicians) in which we
feel we should have a stake. If existential
uncertainty (the bus) is static and an immovable
given, then the uncertainty around the virus is
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painfully kinetic; arguments are being framed
and decisions being made by politicians day-by-
day in a restless and continually unfolding
drama.
That the crisis has come at a time when faith in
official narratives has been seriously undermined
by populist politics and social media makes the
uncertainty particularly difficult. Uncertainty
paralyses action, and it is in action that we
generally find solace for the pain we feel about
the world. That inner paralysis has of course
been exacerbated by the outer paralysis of
lockdown – so many forms of action are
suspended either because of regulations or
because of peer pressure.
So how do we live with this particularly
aggressive and exhausting uncertainty? How do
we still the anxious voice that says, ‘Give me
answers, give me explanations, give me a story
that I can understand, that I can fit into the
schemata I use to make sense of the world’. We
all have a need for a narrative that helps us feel
we still have some control and power. But is
there a way to resist its lure, and instead
experiment with uncertainty? Uncertainty is,
after all, not just a product of this year’s events,
 On Uncertainty
but of the human condition itself. Do we need to
do more to explore it, rather than ignore it or
belittle it, and is the virus offering us an
opportunity to do so?
In conversations about uncertainty, I have
introduced several friends to the words of the
romantic poet, John Keats. In a phrase newly
minted in 1817, familiar to literature students but
otherwise little known, he stepped back from the
proclamations and certainties of the older
generation of romantic poets, and posited instead
what he called ‘Negative Capability’, ‘that is,
when man is capable of being in uncertainties,
Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching
after Fact and reason – Coleridge, for instance
[was] …incapable of remaining Content with
half knowledge’ (letter to George and Thomas
Keats, 22 December 1817).
In the course of 2020 we have all become
familiar, in ourselves and in others, with that
‘irritable reaching after fact and reason’ –
desperate measures to find an explanation, a
truth other than the official one. While the idea
of a conspiracy theory has indeed been
weaponised by the mainstream media to shut
down counter-narratives, it is also true that many
people have turned to such counter-narratives as
a comfort, as a source of certainty in a
maddeningly uncertain world. Such alternative
interpretations frame what is happening in a way
that is reassuring – there is a ‘they’ against
whom our anxieties can solidify into anger or
hatred.
In October last year, I was trying to strike up a
conversation with one of the private security
guards at Jones Hill Wood on the HS2 hit-list,
trying to find some shared ground, and our talk
turned inevitably to life in lockdown. He
identified himself as ‘a truther’ and explained
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that he knew that the virus was a hoax, the
beneficiaries being what he called, ‘the 1 per
cent, the elite’, which he told me was made up of
‘paedophile billionaires’. When I asked him
whether he thought the doctors, nurses and
careworkers who urge me to wear a mask are all
systematically lying, he said that there is no
proof that masks are of any benefit: show me one
peer-reviewed paper on the effectiveness of
masks, he said. His eyes shone with certainty. He
is happy, he has the answers he needs, he has
‘fact and reason’ within his grasp.
We live in febrile times when suspicion that
civic leadership is failing to protect us or treat us
fairly is increasing and when, as a result,
desperation for the comfort of certainty-
narratives is also growing. That is entirely
understandable: we seek a balm to the fear and
anxiety which the last year has introduced. The
problem is that such answers only channel fear
into anger, not least because anger is more
comfortable to live with than fear. Where fear is
powerlessness, anger feels like (‘taking back’)
control. I can see too how, whether deliberately
or not, fear is being manipulated, as a way to
undermine solidarity and community. We see it
for example in the othering of people who wear
or don’t wear masks, which became so bitterly
divisive in the USA during last year.1
That US discourse looks extreme, but there is
clearly a way in which, while much government
and mainstream media messaging has eulogised
solidarity and community – indeed, tried to
ritualise it with the ‘clapping for carers’ in the
UK last spring – in practice, those virtues are
also being undermined. Compassion and
kindness become harder as fear and anger about
others is subtly endorsed and reified, not just
from the margins but also at the core of
 On Uncertainty
mainstream narratives – a drip-drip of suspicion
and paranoia.
Maybe real compassion lies not in certainty but
in uncertainty, in active listening and
engagement with other people’s feelings,
however different they may be from our own.
Real courage perhaps lies in being willing not to
reach for a certainty-narrative with all the anger
against others that it entails. Instead of seeking
out a dominant story, admitting no contradiction,
perhaps we need to recognise, as Lucy Winkett,
Rector of St James’s Church Piccadilly,
remarked recently, that paradox, creativity and
mystery are the soul’s native language. We carry
multiple truths within ourselves, but Covid and
government responses to Covid are eroding our
capacity to remain open and receptive to that
plurality of truths. Choosing to remain open to
plurality, to uncertainty, is a form of resistance
to the colonisation of our community by fear and
anger.
This is what Charles Eisenstein has called ‘the
holy ground of uncertainty’2 when he urges us to
resist the ‘war mentality’ of a polarised society.
In a similar way, Arundhati Roy, after a lifetime
of active resistance to increasingly intolerant
certainty-narratives in her native India, has
written, ‘I believe our liberation lies in the
negotiation. Hope lies in texts that can
accommodate and keep alive our intricacy, our
complexity, and our density against the
onslaught of the terrifying, sweeping
simplifications of fascism.’3
Accepting that we do not know, that we cannot
know, has been part of many spiritual and
religious belief systems. The Tao te Ching, for
example, is insistent on recognising that the
further one goes, the less one knows; on having
patience to wait for clarity; and on the wisdom of
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knowing what we do not know. But this kind of
passivity is profoundly at odds with modernity,
with neoliberal culture. Modern people are
trained to expect answers at their fingertips, and
more, we are encouraged to have opinions on
every subject, however limited our knowledge.
Ill-conceived plebiscites such as the Brexit vote
demand conviction, despite the elusiveness of
facts on which to base a decision; phone-ins,
social media and online reporting demand instant
reaction; information is packaged for ease of
consumption; we are encouraged to binge on
news, to hook up to a drip-feed of confirmatory
stories. Reflection, ambivalence, doubt, do not
sell; shades of grey do not fit in a world of
polarised black and white.
An instinct for certainty is natural. But in his
much-watched lecture ‘The times are urgent: let
us slow down’, the Nigerian academic and
activist Bayo Akomalafe speaks eloquently
about what he calls ‘post-activism’ – that is,
recognising how the way in which we respond to
a crisis can itself become part of the crisis, or
part of the architecture and structure which is the
problem. We need to realise, Akomalafe says,
that the problems we face are not exterior to us.4
He suggests that where we are now, in the
anthropocene, it is no longer possible to come up
with ‘solutions’; and in his re-telling of the 1973
Ursula le Guin story, ‘The ones who walk away
from Omelas’, he posits not knowing the answer
as a way forward.
Perhaps all our charts have failed us, and we
should now consider the legitimacy and
creativity of being lost, of accepting that we do
not know, that we are uncertain. Rebecca Solnit
has written a whole ‘Field Guide’ to getting lost.
In response to the challenge of the pre-Socratic
philosopher Meno, who asked, ‘How will you go
about finding that thing the nature of which is
 On Uncertainty

totally unknown to you?’, she replies, ‘Finding it About the contributor

is a matter of getting lost’. She traces the
etymology of the word ‘lost’ to the Old Norse, David Lambert is a
los, meaning the disbanding of an army, and historian and landscape
remarks that she worries that ‘many people never consultant. In 2016 he
disband their armies, never go beyond what they helped set up Politics
know’.5 Kitchen in Stroud, inspired
by the ideas of active
So the question this past year prompts in me is – listening and a new way of
Does embracing and exploring uncertainty offer doing politics. In 2018 he discovered the seriousness
of the climate emergency and became an active
a way forward, not least in allowing us to foster
member of Extinction Rebellion. David is still
the compassion and empathy we shall need more
coming to terms with the unfolding ecological
than ever, as we navigate this pandemic and the catastrophe and societal breakdown, and he continues
other existential threats which are now welling to seek ways to build resilience and understanding in
up around us? his local community.

References

1 See https://tinyurl.com/y2zfm8ym (accessed 14

January 2021).
2 Charles Eisenstein, ‘The conspiracy myth’, May
2020; available at https://tinyurl.com/yd64fcvf
(accessed 14 January 2021).
3 See https://tinyurl.com/y5qlxrto (accessed 14
January 2021).
4 See https://tinyurl.com/y3fwc32y (accessed 14
January 2021).
5 Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost,
Canongate, Edinburgh, 2006 (first published New
York, 2005), pp. 4–7.

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